Like any parent, I am unendingly proud of my children. While I am privy to the very worst of who they are on a day by day basis, I am also privy to the very best of who they are. Lee and I know our children better than anyone else on this planet. We see what makes them tick, certain aspects of their personalities that need to be polished and refined, and we have a foreshadowing of their gifts and how they can best be used.

With Lee having been a collegiate athlete, and me spending most of my formative years in competitive sports, it’s no surprise that our children have mostly drifted toward athletics, and they are blessed with skills that allow them to compete well. I’m not going to hide the fact that my children are good at sports, but how do I keep them, and myself, humble as we travel this road of competitive sports?

First and foremost, it takes a load of perspective to simply stay realistic. Yesterday Tia had the best gymnastics meet of her season. She improved all of her scores, raised her All Around score by over a point and took home the 1st place All Around trophy. My daughter is a gifted athlete, and right now gymnastics is the sport that is showcasing her God-given abilities.

But she will not be an Olympian. Lee and I know this. Tia, of course, dreams of the Olympics like every little girl dreams of the Olympics, and I will never, ever squash that dream. As long as she wants to go for gold, I’ll be standing behind cheering her on. I just know, however, that she won’t go to the Olympics in gymnastics, and I am okay with that.

Photo courtesy of my mom who blesses us with awesome pictures so we can sit back and enjoy the competition!

As she competes, we work hard to keep her head level by encouraging her to compete against herself. We don’t urge her to beat her teammates, we urge her to beat her last score. At her last meet she scored in the 9’s on two events – this time we told her to aim for scoring 9’s in three events. She took our challenge and upped it, scoring in the 9’s on all four events. That was her own goal for herself.

The cute is almost too much in this photo…

On equal measure, our boys have shown great propensity for sports. One loves to play simply for fun, without a huge care of winning or losing. The other lives, eats and breathes ball, and it will not surprise me one little bit if that one goes on to play college ball, or even play professionally someday. He may not do either of those things, of course, but I wouldn’t be shocked if he did because he’s got a winning spirit combined with natural ability.

No matter what our children choose to do with their extracurricular time, though, we want them to know that athletics are just a pieceof who they were made to be. What matters more to me is the character behind the athletes. Are they kind? Do they support their teammates? Are they good sports? Are they genuinely excited to see someone else succeed, even if they don’t?

And what are they doing off the field, or outside the gym? Those are the things that truly matter. Life isn’t all about sports, and the second that it becomes so, then something must change.

These are lessons that will need to be learned, and they can only be learned if Lee and I model them. We will push them to be the best they can be, but not at the detriment of character. Ways that we work to model healthy competitive character in sports:

– We will never so build our children up that they believe themselves to be all that and a bag of chips (how’d you like that little phrase from the ’80’s?). Humility has to be taught, so as soon as they start thinking they are the bomb, we have to (lovingly) bring them down a notch or two.

– We speak highly of our children’s teammates.We praise their abilities, congratulate their successes, and cheer them on with as much fervor as our own kids.

– To the best of our ability, we try to become friends with the other parents. We have been blessed so far in our sporting endeavors in that we’ve been surrounded by very positive, kind parents. I know that’s not always the case, but thankfully it is our experience, which means it’s not that hard to become friends with the parents of our kid’s teammates!

– We encourage our kids to be the best they can be not to beat their opponents, but to beat themselves.Yes, they want to win, and that’s okay. But do it for yourself, not for anyone else, and be gracious in winning, as well as in losing.

– We simply don’t allow ourselves to get too wrapped up in it. As Lee says, “Never want it more than they do.” When you watch your child compete, it’s so easy to get completely absorbed in every detail of their sport, but we have to remind ourselves that this is not all that comprises a life. Athletics are a small part of who they are – but it’s not the only thing. Lee and I have to remember that ourselves so that we can remind them.

The world of athletics can be tricky to navigate, especially as a parent.We feel every success and every disappointment right alongside our children. But if we can maintain control and perspective over our own emotions, we will be much better equipped to teach our children to control their emotions, which in the long run will only set them up for success in all of life.

Are you a sports family? How do you keep your children (and yourself) humble?

Yesterday I sat in a cheery room looking up at the long watercolor of a beach hanging on the wall. Elevator music played gently from the overhead speakers as I waited rather nervously for the orthodontist to walk in and tell me just how much it was going to cost to iron out the mouths of my babes – the children who, sadly, inherited their mom’s regular (slightly larger than normal?) teeth and their father’s much smaller than normal mouth.

It dawned on me as he explained what we were looking at (thankfully a little further down the road…like starting next year and beyond until forever) for their teeth that I have one more coming up behind them who’s going to need as much, if not more, orthodontia than they do.

I tried to calculate the cost in my mind, allowing for the overlap in treatments from one child to the next, and then smoke came out my ears and instead of finishing my sums, I envisioned swimming in a pool of Nutella because the math was too much and Nutella is my happy place.

Once I settled down a bit, I had a second revelation – I am going to go straight from pull ups to orthodontia without so much as a week off and I suddenly wondered why on Earth we didn’t space these kids out more so we could have a little breathing room?!

Then I remembered that we intendedto space them out more, but God has a sense of humor and was all Oh you want to wait awhile? Here, have a third before the second can walk a straight line.

ThenI thought about the day I found out I was pregnant with Landon and I thought for sure I’d forever ruined Sloan and Tia’s lives by forcing them to accept a new baby when neither could really speak in complete sentences. This, of course, led me to remember Lee’s reaction to finding out we were pregnant a third time. Shock, a small measure of horror and an accusatory stare that somehow placed all the blame on me for apparently thinking a child into my womb.

There followed a rather significant amount of time when I had one child in pull ups and two in diapers. We finally, mercifully, got it down to one in pull ups and one in diapers and then two in pull ups and we’ve finally chipped and whittled away to where we are only buying pull ups for one child.

Nighttime potty training is my nemesis.

My oldest will be 10 next month, which means I have been investing in Huggies and Pampers products for a decade and when I finally surrender the last pull up to the landfills (you’re welcome environment), I will walk straight to the orthodontist’s office and give him my right arm for straight teeth and with three so close together, treatments will overlap, I’ll have to surrender the other arm and six-seven years later we will pay off the orthodontia just in time to start paying for college.

I’m starting to wonder if there is some validity to choosing your favorite child and investing in only that kid for the duration of eighteen years.

All the books on raising children lead me to believe that would be a poor course of action to take in child rearing, but really how much can those crazy child psychologists know anyway, right?

Wrong?

I know, of course, that having children close together is, in the long run, really the way to go. They will be the best of friends (We hope. Judging by how many arguments I’ve broken up since school let out I’m not sure when exactly that friendship thing will kick in, but I have high hopes. High, high hopes. Hiiiiiiiigh hopes), they will experience much of life together and in relatively similar circles. They will be able to create so many memories together, which will hopefully make converstaions around the Thanksgiving table in twenty years a lot more fun and they will have the benefit of knowing that there’s always someone nearby who has your back.

Those are the pros and I’d say, for the most part, the pros outweigh the cons.

And there’s always the hope that the final child will graduate pull ups at least a week before the expanders/braces begin. Seven whole days.

“Now you will have noticed that nothing throws [man] into a passion so easily as to find a tract of time which he reckoned on having at his own disposal unexpectedly taken from him…[This] angers him because he regards his time as his own and feels that it is being stolen. You must therefore zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption ‘My time is my own.’ Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours.” C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

This curious assumption of time is a topic that is not unfamiliar to anyone, least of all the mother of three young children. Time is a curious mystery, fleeting and entirely elusive, yet ever constant and unchanging. Each day allots the same amount of time in which to operate, but it often feels as though time slips right through our fingers like a gush of water.

Lee first read this passage to me late one evening. We were laying in bed and I was trying to do something wildly important like read Facebook statuses and catch up on blogs. My husband, on the other hand, was trying to improve his mind by reading an actual book.

(You remember books, don’t you? They’re made of paper and bound together so that you have to physically turn each page in order to find out what happens next. Fascinating contraptions…)

As he read, he would put his arm on mine and go, “Ooohhh…listen to this.” It was cute the first time, endearing the second time, annoying the third time and so on. He was interrupting my quiet time – my time at the end of the day when I can turn my brain off and waste time without guilt. Could he not see the reverence and near holiness of my solitude?

It was at this point he read me the above passage that made me stop and think. Do I regard myself the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours? I believe that I do!

How has this attitude affected my life and the lives of the people around me?

I will confess that there are few things that irk me more than my kids waltzing in and interrupting me when I am alone. I feel immediately violated and ridiculously offended at their assumption that they can just come in and make demands of me when I am clearly having a moment to myself.

How dare you want food, water, love, attention?!

Shame on me.

“You (the demon, Wormwood, who is tasked with tempting this particular man) have here a delicate task. The assumption which you want him to go on making is so absurd that, if once it is questioned, even we cannot find a shred of argument in its defense. The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift; he might as well regard the sun and moon as his chattels.” C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Time is a gift. Every moment of every day is purely a gift. None of it is mine and I have no right to claim possession of a single moment. What I do in each moment is a reflection of how grateful I am for this ever changing, moving and fleeting gift.

Does this mean I shouldn’t guard some time to be alone? Absolutely not. A healthy mother knows to teach her children the importance of granting her time alone. Time spent away from children strengthens every parent and should be taken regularly.

Time together with my husband is not to be interrupted and I guard it as jealously as I can because this is a healthy use of my time. This is using the gift I’ve been given wisely.

But when the time does get interrupted, what is my reaction? Many times, I confess it is not a holy reaction. As C.S. Lewis wrote so beautifully in this same letter from the demon Screwtape, “The more claims on life, therefore, that your patient [man] can be induced to make, the more often he will feel injured and, as a result, ill-tempered.”

So what is my reaction? Well, more times than not, it is ill-tempered and that makes me sad, because such an attitude toward life is, I believe, what makes life often feel so fleeting.

If I recognize time as a gift and do not hold firm the belief that I am the lawful possessor of my moments, I can react graciously when time is interrupted – when random hugs need to be given while I’m working on a blog post, or the phone rings when I’m working on my book – when a neighbor knocks on the door while we’re eating dinner, or my husband wants to read to me while I’m trying to shut down for the evening.

What’s more, when I regard time as a gift, I will be able to use my time to bless others. When I’m less focused on time being my own then I can help those who need my help and do so in a way that makes them feel important and not so much like they were an interruption.

If I embrace each moment as a gift, I am more likely to live for the moment, to love in the moment, to bless in the moment and maybe every once in a while, I could catch a moment in my hand and hold it for a lifetime.

I walked in the door after a beautiful weekend away and kissed their sweet, sweaty faces. They’d been outside running, playing, relishing in all that is childhood. They looked like children who were having a grand old time.

In short, they were filthy. So I suggested a shower. Crazy, right? I know!!

Here’s the thing – generally we do not make our children shower every night. It’s a pain, they don’t like it and I can handle a little bit of dirt and slightly crusty hair for a few days in a row. However, when they play outside for hours without shoes on (yes, I am raising those kids) I generally think it entirely reasonable to have them jump under the running water long enough to bring their feet back to a normal peachy color and less…blackened by mud.

But I was unaware of the fact that showers were taken the night before and the night before that and oh you’d think I’d come home with a whip in hand and walked through the door cracking it. There was weeping, gnashing of teeth, glares that could easily turn one into a pillar of salt. The horror of suggesting a shower for a third night in a row.

BOOOOOO MOMMY!

Welcome to parenthood, right? You attend a conference established to encourage and refresh you in the journey, you come home armed with loved and gratefulness for the small ones lent to you for this lifetime and you prepare yourself for a sweet reunion complete with kisses, snuggles and giggles. It will be a beautiful time as they gather around you, sitting quietly with hands folded sweetly in their laps, their hair clean and slicked to the side.

“Tell us about your weekend, Mother,” they will say, all sugary and precious. “Tell us more about how truly wonderful you are going to be from here on out. Tell us how magical life will be now that you have been blessed with so much knowledge and wisdom.”

(Side note: You should read the above dialogue in a British accent because it sounds a lot cooler and gives a better dramatic punch. Just give a try…)

(See what I mean?)

You imagine that surely your job will be easier now, because you’ve just learned how to be a better mom. You’ve just learned how to love them more graciously. You have new tools in your arsenal to build them up and point them toward their full potential.

Unfortunately, the kids don’t get the memo about all of that. They go on acting like…kids. They haven’t become the perfect little robots that will make your job a walk in the proverbial park. It’s like a cruel, cruel joke.

Does this happen to anyone else? Is it just me? I hope not, because within fifteen minutes of being with my children last night I was already completely fed up. It was all I had in me not to point my finger, grit my teeth and mutter, “Look, kid. I just learned how to be the best mom I can be and you’re in here making it difficult. Be nice so I can be AWESOME.”

I didn’t say that, of course.

Out loud.

We finally got them in bed (with only two actually showered and one with clean feet after we comprimised and wiped them down with a wet rag) and I collapsed on the couch and looked wide-eyed at Lee, my eyes conveying every emotion and frustration I felt. I’m home fifteen minutes and I already want to cuss? Hellooooo real life! Thanks for smacking me in the face.

Lee smiled, winked and patted me softly on the shoulder. “Welcome home,” he said with a grin and I could hear the chuckle in his voice.